Bye, Becky! Why I’m Never Here For Solidarity With White Women.

We all know “the man.” We’ve been blaming him for decades for destroying our communities. I don’t disagree with blaming white men who run this country with purposely and strategically planting drugs, guns and poisonous food in the black community to keep us high, killing each other and unhealthy. Nor do I deny underfunding and overcrowding public schools in poor black neighborhoods is to maintain white supremacy by keeping our children behind in reading, writing and math. And I’m certainly never going to question the police being placed in our neighborhoods with an arsenal of weapons and instructions, expressed or implied, to treat black people as a constant and immediate threat. I hold white men responsible for all of these crimes and consider them a natural adversary to me as a black person and a woman. Yes, white men are responsible for constructing, perfecting and maintaining the system of racism, oppression, inequity and inequality known as white supremacy, but they share that burden and its spoils with a conspicuously unnamed co-conspirator: white women.

I realize that women, without regard to race, remain a marginalized group globally, but since when has being oppressed meant you cannot be an oppressor? Black men are undeniably oppressed, but still oppress black women. Gay white men are part of an oppressed group, but they’re master oppressors. So I’m always baffled, and quite frankly enraged, when white women feign solidarity with me painting themselves as innocent victims of the tyranny of white men.

They’re all too ready to be the sistas’ sisters, but history teaches me and the present confirms that white women are no sisters of mine. Surely the time for the solidarity they now seek was when their sons and husbands entered the cabins of enslaved black women, ripped their clothes and reminded them that their bodies belonged to white men. Where was their empathy and clapback then? Instead of pleading with your husbands or ordering your sons to stop, you turned your wrath to the black victims of their violent sociopathy. You abused our children conceived by rape and terrorized their mothers to massage your own ego, which was punctured by the knife of insecurity every time your husband chose to violate a black body instead of taking yours which you offered so eagerly.

And what of your feminism? You have yet to answer Sojourner’s question, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Yet, you deify Margaret Sanger hailing her as the god of the modern feminist movement while minimalizing, explaining or altogether ignoring her racist ideas and practices. You lift her up because despite how she felt about “blacks”, she was still a great champion of women’s rights. And this is why the sistas are not your sisters.

See you all look in the mirror and a see a woman because white is the default. We look in the mirror and see a black woman. And for us, race and gender are coconut and rice. When you mix the coconut of blackness with the rice of womanhood, one is indistguishable and inseparable from the other. So if you want a spoonful of my rice know that it’ll be mashed with my coconut.

Now you’ve learned to twerk and mastered those twisted mini buns (read Bantu knots) and now you wanna call me “boo” and erase the color lines between us. But you’re still calling Trayvon a thug who got what he deserved and when I mention Aiyana you think I’m mispronouncing Trump’s ex-wife’s name. Then I catch your “I’m not racist but…” disclaimer followed by paragraphs of the most disgustingly racist shit I’ve ever read. And when Beyonce twerks or Nikki curses or Rihanna lets a bitch know he better have her money or he’ll find his prized white woman in the back seat of her “brand new foreign car,” y’all go in with your think pieces about how my sistas are practicing the same misogyny that your white husbands invented. But then I see y’all going crazy about how Jennifer Lawrence was violated because she had private nude photos leaked and I’m wondering if y’all missed the ones of Gabrielle and Jill. And then you make jokes about ghetto names and hairstyles while expecting Shaniqua in her box braids to vote for Hillary despite her racist history and present because she’d represent a victory for all women when we know that she looks like you and would be a victory for you. And you think we don’t remember when Susan Smith lied and said a black man kidnapped her two white sons, and y’all racist asses jumped all over it only to find out she had murdered her own children. But the last straw – really not the last because I was born done with y’all – was when you saw a grown ass man sitting on a bikini-clad 14-year-old black girl’s back after he’d pulled her hair and body slammed her, and you responded by talking about how she and her friends crashed a fucking pool party.

Let’s be real: White women don’t want solidarity with black women. Y’all want lap dogs. You want our anatomy sans this melanin. You don’t want us playing the “race card,” but you damn sure have no problem playing the pussy card. You want us to ignore your fingers falsely pointed at our brothers, sons and husbands crying rape. We ain’t here for it. If you make us choose between coconut and rice, I guarantee we’ll be eating macaroons every time.

Now if you’re really interested in some solidarity, use that pillow talk to get your husbands to come up off them coins they owe me and mine. Bake your sons cookies and serve them with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade while you impress upon them that they are not the center of the fucking univer

se despite what everyone says. Then, take you daughters for some retail therapy and explain to them that they are not the Hope Diamond personified even though every magazine, movie, teacher and textbook will have them believing they’re the most precious commodity on earth. Handle all of that and then maybe – making no promises – the sistas will call you sisters.